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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#461

Post by jmb99 »

frizlab wrote: post #237
schmidtleonard wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the macOS feature history, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the team got shifted to iPhone in 2007 and never really recovered. The widely acknowledged Snow Leopard high water mark happened shortly after. To be fair, Apple can still pull off the occasional amazing feat of vertical integration -- HDR, APFS, keeping audio latency under control despite the relentless assault of apathy from all directions…

Snow leopard is fondly remembered but was buggy has hell when initially released. It got good , with time…

Perhaps I was just lucky, but 10.6.0 was equally stable as 10.5.8 for me. It did improve with time, and there’s little opposition to 10.6.8 being the best OS X release there was (except maybe 10.9.5), but for me at least it was a great OS even at launch.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#462

Post by lawgimenez »

kyledrake wrote: post #437

I tried a Macbook again when the M1 chips came out, and wasn't impressed with the performance. Despite incredible benchmarks, the interface just felt bloated and sluggish. The biggest issue for me though was Darwin's weird psuedo-complete unix environment. All of my production servers are Linux, and it's a real pain to have to torture software that works great on Linux over to Apple's OS. Homebrew is nice, but even t…

I feel like M chips are for those who’s upgrade cycle is over 5 years like me. Coming from MBP 2015 to M2 is stunning.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#463

Post by JKCalhoun »

markus_zhang wrote: post #66

I just don't understand why Apple UI designers hate scroll bars with such a passion. It's probably just me, but I feel that many apps on Apple follows the same pattern. For example checkout and compare the scroll bar experience on ChatGPT website (Chrome) between a Mac-book and a Windows laptop.

Disappearing scrollbars pisses me off as well.

But I can tell you how/why (I think) it happened.

They dropped them in iOS when the iPhone rolled out. It made sense given the small display area where even a 10 to 12 pixel column makes a difference.

And then, sadly, there came the slow roll to make both MacOS and iOS look the same and so they started auto-hiding on the Mac as well.

It's the form-before-function that I loathe ever since Jony started making round mice or USB connectors impossible to find.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#464

Post by wvenable »

crazygringo wrote: post #366
swat535 wrote: post #212

It's not just Apple guys, it's everywhere. Software quality has seriously declined across the board, from Spotify to Slack to core operating systems like Windows and macOS. I think a major factor is corporate culture, which largely ignores software quality. Another issue is that many engineers lack a solid understanding of CS fundamentals like performance, security, and reliability (perhaps this is why many are not a…

Honestly, I don't think it's a culture thing or a CS fundamentals thing. I think it's the fact that software is 100x, or maybe even 1,000x, more complex that it was just 25 years ago. Apps are built on so many libraries and frameworks and packages that an average application will have 100x the amount of code. And they're all necessary . A typical phone app is 200 MB, when Word 4.0 was less than 1 MB. But it's not jus…

Some rose-tinted glasses looking at the past. There was a time when your entire computer would crash if you just looked at it funny.

Raw stability of software is much higher -- there are just more minor annoyances because there is also much more software.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#465

Post by nicoburns »

ethbr1 wrote: post #448
_aavaa_ wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year. I’m glad I’m not the only one. It’s mind boggling . I’ve had to start putting in my best guess just to have it save…

For exclusively Apple ecosystem users, how do you handle these feature gaps? Just get used to working around them and ignore? I feel like every time I swap to the Mac ecosystem it's a litany of "Hunh, that weird tiny thing doesn't work" issues. PS: USB-C DisplayPort MST (display daisy-chaining) support that's been missing for... a decade and counting?

> Just get used to working around them and ignore?

Pretty much. It's not like the other operating systems are better in this regard. In general there's a lot more software that's buggy like this than software that's reliable

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#466

Post by ethbr1 »

pengaru wrote: post #459
bondolo wrote: post #390

While I worked at Apple in 2021-22 their issues seemed about the same as nearly every other company producing consumer apps and devices; bloated slow garbage with very mediocre quality. Their engineering culture is terrible, especially as it relates to transfer of the “Apple ethos” to the next generation of devs. Apple is going to be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack within the next decade. But most of all…

Having joined a large established FAANG, it's become quite apparent that in any large established entity with so much management and meta work, with strong incentives driving more energy towards the meta work than where the rubber meets the road, it's inevitable for product quality to deteriorate. Internally the prioritized output becomes the meta work, not what reaches customers. What reaches customers is almost som…

Interesting observation. I suppose most startups haven't existed for long enough for the meta-optimizing employees to be promoted over work-optimizing employees, yet.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#467

Post by Take8435 »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #429
dandellion wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the feeling. I'm forced to use a Mac laptop for work, and it's really made me appreciate Linux.

Linux is better than Windows on most counts for sure, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to use it full-time without making significant concessions on preferences about how desktop environment stuff works. If you’re someone who grew up on Macs there’s almost nothing in the Linux desktop space that tries to replicate that set of patterns… it’s all Win9X-type taskbar setups, mobile-type setups (GNOME, Pantheon), old ni…

> If you’re someone who grew up on Macs there’s almost nothing in the Linux desktop space that tries to replicate that set of patterns… it’s all Win9X-type taskbar setups, mobile-type setups (GNOME, Pantheon), old niche *nix setups (e.g. WindowMaker), and of course minimal tiling WMs. There’s no clones of Mac OS of any flavor.

Have you seen https://hyprland.org?

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#468

Post by JKCalhoun »

eviks wrote: post #133

> I call on Apple to return to its roots - creating products that prioritize user experience over feature checklists. The company that once proudly created products that "just work" needs to reclaim that ethos. But this is a mythic past, not the real one, embarrassing software bugs have always been present! Moreover, it's never been limited to just software, remember premium laptop keyboard design fiasco, for example…

That's not true in my experience. I started at Apple in 1995 and user experience was king. Honestly, Jobs return was more or less the start of the decline (but, not of the stock price of AAPL of course).

Why did Apple engineering culture decline then? It became top-down, no longer bottom-up.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#469

Post by JKCalhoun »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #142
alberth wrote: post #30

Is this a real problem, or a perceived problem? I know people like to complain about Apple's software quality - but is this actually an issue - or just the popular thing to say?

My own experience has been the opposite. Early versions of OS/X were dire, things like a kernel panic when removing an already ejected USB stick. People like to point at Snow Leopard as being the peak of reliability but there are two things to consider about that. The first is that the previous versions were so bad that they had to stop creating new features and do a bug fix only release. The other is that it still n…

And yet I think we're at another point where things are so bad that we need another bug-fix-only release. (Or two or three in a row.)

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#470

Post by materielle »

legitster wrote: post #204
packetlost wrote: post #12

I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who…

> a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia. 15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catc…

Yea I totally agree. This is selective memory.

Perhaps there were peaks and troughs in individual technologies. Late 2000s / early 2010s felt like a good time for operating systems, for instance.

But is everyone forgetting having to navigate through Flash websites and Java Applets using Internet Explorer, for instance?

Also, people are just forgetting. There’s nostalgia in this thread about the iTunes desktop app, for instance. That program has been a pile of trash for as long as I can remember back in the 2000s.

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